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Matthew is gaining strength again tonight, and Florida and South Carolina are still going to see a significant (perhaps severe) storm. If the eye stays out to sea, it will not be as bad as it could be, but if it crosses just inland, much greater damage and a major storm surge is likely. Still a rather large disagreement between the higher res. regional models and the global models today. The …

Tropical Update : I’m not going to post any specific model data since there is still quite a bit of disagreement, and any individual run this far out is worthless, but that said: My concern that a tropical cyclone will threaten the SE U.S. in 5-7 days is growing rapidly. The system is looking much healthier on the satellite images tonight. Increased convection and shear seems less. The wind shear …

Radar from the Taiwan Weather Service shows the first rain bands approaching Taiwan, Winds are at 150 knots near the center of Nepartak, but it should weaken some before landfall, as it encounters the mountains of Taiwan, and slightly cooler water. It will still be a very dangerous storm though, and it will cross into mainland China, and drop very heavy rainfall over the same area that experienced severe flooding …

The latest track from the Joint Typhoon Warning Center shows Super Typhoon Chan-Hom passing very near Shanghai, and landfall will likely be south of the city, putting Shanghai in the path of the highest storm surge. Winds are estimated at 120 knots, and while it will weaken some before landfall, it will still likely produce a major storm surge. This storm looks very healthy on satellite images tonight, and it …

Virtually all of the global and regional numerical weather models are showing the potential for very heavy rainfall from what will soon be Tropical Storm Bill in the Gulf. Even if this region had not had historic flooding in May, this would be a big deal, but with the soggy ground, we are now looking at the potential for a very severe and costly flood event. There are some indications …

A tropical cyclone in early May is VERY rare in the Atlantic. Hurricane season does not start until June first, but there’s only about a 50% chance (on average) of seeing a June storm in the Atlantic Basin. That said, there are indications of a possible tropical cyclone developing east of Cuba in the next 36 hours, with several different numerical models indicating development. Some of the model guidance brings …

NASA Astronauts have been sending back jaw dropping images of Super Typhoon Maysak, headed toward the Philippines with winds of nearly 240 km/hr. Astronaut Terry Virts uploaded some incredible photos of the eye of Maysak to his Twitter account as well and they provide one of the best views of an intense tropical cyclone ever made from low Earth orbit. The Super Typhoone is likely going to hit the northern Philippines in …

This freshwater plume inhibits the mixing of colder water beneath the surface, and thus can add a lot of heat to an already powerful hurricane. The NASA Aquarius satellite has a sensor that can measure ocean surface salinity, and it’s data produced the the video below. A paper about this plume and how it can affect hurricanes was published in Geophysical research Letters in 2012. It’s free to read here. …

What is going on? Is it the revenge of the polar vortex? Actually, it’s probably connected to Japanese Typhoon Neogori that at one time was packing 260 kph winds. It is moving into southern Japan now, but the global weather models all indicate that it will push a lot of warm and humid air into the high latitudes north of Japan. This will push the jet-stream northward, and the downstream …

The typhoon should weaken before hitting Japan, but Kyushu (southern most island) will get a ton of rain and wind. Flooding rains have already been reported earlier in the week so the soil is already saturated. ISS Astronaut Reid Wisemen sent back this shot of an oddly shaped eye on Neogori. (Perhaps related to the fact it was undergoing an eye-wall replacement cycle.)

Frying Pan Shoals off the North Carolina coast caught a gust to 99 mph on their weather station. They were in the eye-wall of Hurricane Arthur at the time. Here on the Delmarva Peninsula there is a real risk of extreme rip currents behind the storm. With thousands of folks streaming to the Maryland and Delaware beaches for the holiday weekend, this is a serious threat. Something to think about: …

You may need to click on the image above to really see the ripples across the top of Arthur, so do that first, before I tell you why they are there. You are looking at gravity waves, but a better way of understanding it is to compare it to the ripples you see after you throw a rock into a still pond. The rock disturbs the water and makes …

There are claims going around that Typhoon Haiyan was a result of climate change, and this is nothing short of ridiculous. There is some evidence that climate change will change the numbers (and intensity) of tropical cyclones, and some that the storms that do form will be stronger and wetter. That said, there is still a lot of uncertainty in those predictions. An excellent paper on this subject is from …

The resolution is 375 meters on this image. Ctsy. Dan Lindsey at CIRA in Colorado. There was apparently a big jump in lightning around the eye at landfall. More on that here. GOES R will have on-board lightning detection when it launches in a couple of years. This instrument alone is likely to lead to some new discoveries and significant improvements in now-casting and forecasting. A nice loop of the …

Winds of over 190 mph and millions in its path. High potential for a major catastrophe. Radar image at sunrise in the Philippines showing an intense eye wall approaching… Bacolod, a city of over a half million, may get the brunt of Haiyan.

My friend Bob Henson at the National Center for Atmospheric Research has a great piece on Atmos News about Sandy today. NCAR has published some amazing high-resolution model runs of Sandy, and in some ways Sandy actually behaved like a tornadic super-cell. The model runs show that as Sandy approached a cold front, it tilted tubes of rotation air from the horizontal to the vertical. This same thing happens in …

Andrea is stronger this afternoon and late-model runs continue to track it NE across the Carolinas, and right over my home here on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Winds are going to be gusty (perhaps over 40 knots in gusts), but rainfall is far and away the bigger threat. June tropical storms happen in the Atlantic Basin every other year or so, but Andrea may be a storm that is …